Secure Information Exchange Featured Article

With growing volumes and a host of formats to manage and leverage, organizations need to bring structure to the unstructured; up to 80 percent of enterprise information in an organization is unstructured. Structured information is relatively simple to manage because it’s fairly easy for computers to crunch the data and do something with it, whereas unstructured information, which includes documents, PowerPoint presentations, images, audio and video, is a little harder. The formats are a little more complex and you can’t just neatly organize it into rows and columns in the database.

I had the chance to speak with Lubor Ptacek, the VP of strategic marketing at OpenText, one of the major players in Enterprise Information Management (News - Alert) (EIM), about managing this unstructured information and enabling organizations to improve business overall through this management.

“What we’ve been doing over the last 20 years is we’ve developed competencies around managing unstructured information,” said Ptacek. “It starts with business documents, and eventually we’ve added things like rich media management, management of e-mail, management of enterprise reports, management of data that comes from ERP applications and so on. There are a lot of different types of content we can manage and we can help organizations to put this to work but also to protect it, to make sure that from the cost point of view as well as from security and compliance points of view we can achieve the organizational goals.”

This week, OpenText unveiled the industry’s largest field cloud designed specifically to address enterprise information management. OpenText Cloud aims to provide all OpenText software as cloud-based offerings, in addition to the existing on-premises products. OpenText Cloud provides more than 20,000 customers with anytime, anywhere access to OpenText’s EIM solution portfolio in the cloud, including more than 20 ready-to-use applications and services.

The OpenText Cloud is basically a combination of multiple different product offerings that are available now as a cloud solution, meaning that customers don’t have to deploy them on their own premises andthey don’t have to maintain it themselves.

“We do it for them,” said Ptacek. “They just take advantage of the functionality.”

Unlike most cloud vendors, which focus primarily on providing infrastructure and applications in the cloud, OpenText provides a complete stack that includes the specific knowledge and contextual support for deployment and maintenance, management, monitoring, security, optimization, upgrade and application management, including SLA.

“The OpenText Cloud is quite unique because the functionality that we are putting in is specific to enterprise information management, so the managing unstructured data. There are a lot of cloud vendors out there, and most of them are building the platform and letting other vendors run their own applications on top of it. Or if they are building applications, those are usually very structured applications,” said Ptacek. “Ours deals with unstructured data, so anything from capture and faxing all the way to archiving and records retention and core content management. All of the functionality is becoming available to the OpenText Cloud.

The OpenText Cloud comes right off of an acquisition earlier this year of EasyLink, a provider of cloud-based messaging and business integration services. Through EasyLink, OpenText has gotten infrastructure of data centers around the world.

“What we have done since then is we have put a lot of our offerings into that infrastructure. Kind of overnight we have gotten a worldwide footprint with our data centers, and that gives us the reliability and scalability that enterprises need,” said Ptacek.

One of the biggest benefits about the cloud that most organizations enjoy is that you don’t have to install the software and run it yourself. The vendor, in this case, OpenText, takes care of administering and maintaining software, databases, application servers and operating systems, so businesses only have to use the software and work toward reaching company goals.

“What’s also notable about our approach is our customers are enterprises. The enterprise world is a little different than the consumer space. One of the key differentiators is that organizations are usually exposed to legal and regulatory requirements that they need to adhere to,” explained Ptacek. “So very often, communication needs to happen, but it needs to be captured, it needs to be saved, it needs to be filed as a record, it needs to be made very secure, and those are the kind of specific requirements of companies. Very often it goes to country-specific requirements, such as regulations that require the information doesn’t leave the country; that’s called data sovereignty. Those are the kind of specific requirements that if you are a company and you want to use the cloud, that is what you need.”